Four Tips to Hack Your Growth Marketing

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Bhaskar Roy is VP of Growth at ?Workato?, a enterprise-grade integration and automation platform that requires no code. Roy has more than 20 years of experience building innovative products and bringing them to market. He was a former co-founder of Qik, a mobile video company later acquired by Skype / Microsoft, and Playphone, a mobile gaming platform acquired by GungHo Online Entertainment. Roy also led various product and marketing groups at companies like Microsoft and Oracle.

Today, there are a million and one ways to market your business. Some of these methods are fads to give you a quick boost, but nothing replaces the tried-and-true approaches to finding, winning, and making your customers successful and building your growth model based on that.

Chamath Palihapitiya, the former VP of Growth at Facebook, first introduced this basic growth model that is used by a number of companies.

The model provides a great framework for you to come up with a growth model that is specific to your business. For example - an e-commerce growth model would be different than the above model.

In my experience working with a number of B2B SaaS companies, the more forward-thinking ones adopt a model like the one below:

This is a simple framework for how to look at your overall growth if you are a B2B SaaS company. Here are some tips to make each of these phases more effective!

Technology can help you with each specific channel, but it can also help you better manage your funnel and keep a bird’s eye view of the end-to-end customer journey. A great example of this is People.ai, an AI platform for data-driven sales and marketing leaders.

Like many B2B companies, the company relies on a fairly complex, omnichannel marketing funnel. Customers must be nurtured and followed up with appropriately, but this is made more complex by the sheer number of marketing campaigns that People.ai runs—including events, webinars, and digital advertising. With all this activity, it became difficult for People.ai to monitor key activity and act on it quickly.

To simplify the process, People.ai uses a chatbot to push notifications on key customer touchpoints happening in apps—like Marketo and Eventbrite—into specific Slack channels. These notifications not only provide a 360° of each lead, but they’re also actionable, so the team can follow up right away without leaving Slack. Automation also gives the company more granular control over who can see which notifications, so nothing ever gets lost in the shuffle.

The key aspect of this phase is to make sure that the potential customer is able to see success themselves. It is not about a sales rep or sales engineer showing or demonstrating the product and what it can do; it’s about the prospect being able to use your product and getting the feeling of “I can do this.” This is the “magic moment.”

There can be a number of steps leading up to the magic moment, but the sooner you get your prospects to that stage, the better.

Ultimate Ears Pro, a Logitech subsidiary, and supplier of custom in-ear monitors for professional musicians, uses a memorable in-store experience to unlock magic moments for new customers. The company has multiple stores where customers can walk in and have their ears scanned to create a 3D view of the ear—the first step in creating a custom earpiece that fits them perfectly.

Each person who has their ear scanned is potentially a new customer, so Ultimate Ears pro takes full advantage of the process: they make sure that all in-store leads are added to their CRM so they can follow up quickly. The magic moment happens when the potential customer tries the custom in-ear monitor and sees for themselves how different that experience is compared to others. Automation plays a key role in getting prospects to their magic moment as quickly as possible.

Companies also want to enable their prospects to get to their magic moment as soon as possible. The first is an easy-to-use product that people can use to build integrations and automation with a few clicks so that they can get started quickly.

Besides that, companies also can conduct host weekly webinars. For example at my current company, we host weekly webinars called Expert Hour, to help prospects with any issues they could be facing in building their recipe. Finally, we run a half-day hands-on workshop, called Work Jam, where attendees show up with their laptops and leave with fully-functioning workflows built on our platform. These workshops encourage prospective customers to discover the potential of our product by facilitating a supportive, helpful environment. It’s truly magical to see it “click” for someone when they realize what your product can do!

Ideally, you go live the same day or within a few days of you signing a contract with your customer. This is an ambitious goal for most B2B SaaS providers, as typically there’s implementation and onboarding process involved with most products before the customer even sees value.

In my experience, automation and emerging technologies like AI can be invaluable in making this happen. From streamlining onboarding to providing intelligent insights into the customer journey, it can help your sales and customer success teams start engaging with the customer’s needs and mapping out their go-live date—all of which you can then automatically manage and monitor.

Continue to “wow” your customers time after time

With a subscription-based SaaS product, you have to earn your business back again at renewal time. However, if you are not proactively looking at how you continue to “wow” your customer on a regular basis, the renewal or upgrade conversation becomes tough.

What this means is that you have to continuously monitor your customers’ interactions and usage, looking for signals and ensuring that your customers are really taking advantage of your product and the overall expertise that you provide as a company.

Technologies like an automation platform and AI can help customer success and the account manager better monitor customer behavior and assess whether it’s time to take action—like discussing an upgrade with them. These technologies can even enable your team to perform a sentiment analysis of a customer interaction using IBM Watson for intelligent guidance on what action to take.

The growth model and the tips here provide a framework for you to assess and build a model that is specific to your business. Ultimately, growth models can be a powerful tool for finding customers and turning them into repeat buyers. With a little perspective and some help from technologies like automation platforms, you can truly achieve impressive results!